Powering Partnerships: Can Green Connectivity in Africa Turn EU-China Rivarly into Cooperation?

Introduction

Connectivity projects in Africa's green energy and digital infrastructure sectors can become channels for EU-China cooperation if governed through transparent, multilateral mechanisms. Both the EU and China seek to expand access to reliable energy, strengthen the resilience of power systems, and accelerate decarbonisation. For the EU, partnerships in the African renewable sector support climate goals, energy security, and Global Gateway priorities. For China, its presence in Africa sustains the international market for Chinese solar and grid technologies while reinforcing long-standing engagements under the BRI. Africa’s abundant renewable resources, coupled with its need for large-scale transmission investment, create a conducive space where cooperation can be mutually beneficial for all three actors. Indeed, the continent has become the testing ground for whether infrastructure can be a mechanism for diplomacy rather than zero-sum competition. Connectivity can thus serve as a diplomatic route to managing the growing mistrust between Europe and China.

Defining Connectivity

In modern geopolitics, the term connectivity has evolved from a technical concept into a geopolitically strategic one. It no longer solely refers to physical infrastructure such as roads, ports or undersea cables, but rather a broader system that links economies and technologies across borders. In this sense, connectivity has come to represent diplomatic currency; a means through which states project influence and build alliances.

In the contemporary geopolitical landscape, two pillars of connectivity stand out: green and digital. Green connectivity encompasses power grids and renewable energy infrastructure. On the other hand, digital connectivity involves data cables, cloud infrastructure and 5G networks. Together, they form part of the fourth industrial revolution and vital lifelines of  21st century globalisation.

Connectivity offers a twofold advantage. Economically, it has the potential to enable developmental gains by attracting investment, reducing transaction costs and promoting regional integration. Simultaneously, it holds geopolitical leverage. Through financing, building, or regulating infrastructure, states can expand market access for their local firms, export technical standards, and cultivate dependencies that translate into political influence. This explains why both the European Union and China view connectivity as a competition. Whoever builds and governs these networks will, in effect, write the rules of the global order.

China-Africa Green Energy Collaborations

China’s energy engagement in Africa has diversified into a new phase that extends beyond the traditional Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The 2024 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), held in Beijing and attended by nearly every African head of state, marked this shift. The resulting Beijing Action Plan (2025-2027) reaffirmed Beijing's commitment to green, small-scale, and locally driven infrastructure projects under President Xi Jinping's 'Small Yet Beautiful' vision, which seeks to prioritise renewable energy, rural electrification, and sustainable urban development over megaprojects such as the Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya or the Addis-Djibouti Railway in Ethiopia. 

A central pillar of the new approach is the Belt and Road Green Development (BRGD), which aims to focus on green development across Africa through strategic partnerships, policy implementation, and capacity building. This birthed the Belt and Road Green Energy Cooperation Action Plan (2024-2029), which seeks to encourage  Belt and Road Energy Partner members to carry out no fewer than five joint research and development projects and no fewer than five collaborations in areas such as hydrogen energy, new types of energy storage, carbon capture, utilisation, and storage. In addition, China is strengthening its capacity-building programs in the field of green development through the 'Luban workshops'. Luban is a cultural, academic, and talent exchange platform with African countries in the energy sector that aims to enhance educational cooperation and knowledge exchange. 

This strategy aligns with Africa’s rapidly growing demand for distributed renewable systems. For example, China now supplies the majority of solar photovoltaic modules used in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, driving down prices and enabling off-grid electrification. At the utility scale, projects like Uganda’s Karuma Hydropower Plant, a 1.7 billion USD venture financed by the Export-Import Bank of China and built by Sinohydro, demonstrate Beijing’s continuing role in providing large-scale generation capacity.

At the bilateral level, frameworks like the China-Nigeria Three-Year Cooperation Plan (2024-2026) illustrate Beijing’s pivot toward tailored, country-specific partnerships that blend trade, energy investment, and industrial capacity building. This has led to an increase in China’s international voice and influence in the field of new energy.

Europe-Africa Green Energy Collaborations

Europe, however, has an equally growing influence on green development in Africa. The European Union's Africa-Europe Green Energy Initiative (AEGEI), a key initiative of the Global Gateway Africa-Europe Investment Package, seeks to broaden access to energy across Africa through electricity production from renewable sources. This initiative was announced at the 2022 AU-EU Summit, supported by approximately 20 billion EUR in Team Europe financing and consequently reaffirmed through successive Global Gateway updates. AEGEI aims to enable 50 GW of renewable energy generation capacity by 2030, providing electricity for over 100 million people on the continent. 

Its three primary objectives are to enhance access to affordable and sustainable energy for African citizens and businesses, boost the generation of renewable energy, and promote energy efficiency. The initiative supports major clean energy infrastructure projects and off-grid solutions, as well as assisting African partners in creating favourable conditions for clean energy deployment. Its central premise is that Africa’s energy transition is both a development imperative and a geopolitical opportunity to reshape global energy flows in a low-carbon era.

Since 2023, the AEGEI and wider Global Gateway framework have begun to translate commitments into concrete energy projects across the continent. In West Africa, the newly inaugurated West African Power Pool Coordination Centre in Benin strengthens the region’s ability to coordinate national grid operations and manage a unified electricity market, with the aim of improving the stability and affordability of electricity for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) citizens. Additionally, the 192,198 EUR ‘Solar solutions for Agriculture in Nigeria-Technology Transfer’ project between Germany (Bavaria) and Nigeria selected experts and managers from Nigeria to develop the knowledge required to plan and implement solar solutions in the agricultural sector, reflecting AEGEI's facilitation of connectivity between clean energy, skills development, and livelihoods.

AEGEI is also expanding into alternative green technologies. A flagship Power-to-X initiative in Morocco, supported by  110 million USD in German and EU grants, is designed to establish one of Africa’s first green-hydrogen plants. Beyond electricity generation, the initiative supports clean-cooking transitions through the West Africa Clean Cooking Programme, including national action plans in ECOWAS states, the development of information and awareness materials, and hands-on training for entrepreneurs and women’s groups. These efforts have resulted in community-level programmes such as improved cookstove production and the distribution of hundreds of efficient stoves to rural households in Ghana and Sierra Leone.

These projects illustrate not only the scale but the diversity of AEGEI’s approach and reflect the EU’s ambition to anchor its partnership with Africa in sustainable energy transition.

African-Led Trilateral Cooperation: Strategic Gains for the EU, China, and Africa

While political tensions often limit direct EU-China collaboration, green energy connectivity creates a distinct set of incentives that make trilateral cooperation between the EU, China, and Africa strategically sound.

For Africa, the primary benefits are the expansion of electricity generation capacity and a contribution to carbon emission reduction through the development of renewable energy projects. Beyond this, EU-China investments offer economic benefits such as job creation for local workers during construction and operations, as well as local skills improvement through technological learning and capacity building. The investment can also bolster local businesses' manufacturing capacity by connecting with European and Chinese renewable energy supply chains.

The EU, co-financing green energy infrastructure with China, would reduce fiscal pressure, accelerate delivery timelines and stabilise the energy systems of a neighbouring region whose development and economic resilience directly affect Europe, particularly in matters of immigration. For instance, the EU’s own Court of Auditors criticisedmajor external investment institutions, notably the European Fund for Sustainable Development (2017-2020), for ‘slow disbursement and..project pipelines’, highlighting structural delivery delays in EU overseas infrastructure financing. On migration, the EU’s experience with the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa ( 2015-2021) illustrates how development initiatives have struggled to produce quick, tangible improvements. Evaluations show that drivers of irregular migration persisted, partly because investment was neither large-scale enough nor fast enough to transform local economies. 

China, meanwhile, gains an export boost through Chinese goods, services, and capital needed to construct or install renewable energy structures. Chinese financial institutions benefit by providing loans and export credits, while Chinese Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) firms secure turnkey project contracts. This approach results in significant business for Chinese technology suppliers, contractors, and, in some cases, labour. Moreover, co-funding with Team Europe institutions and African development banks reduces debt distress criticisms and opens opportunities for Chinese firms to operate in blended finance environments that are becoming central to Africa’s green transition plans.

The question remains: why should the EU and China engage in trilateral cooperation with Africa? Despite growing geopolitical friction, green energy remains one of the few areas where EU-China interests overlap. In the context of escalating global tensions, trilateral engagement offers an invaluable means for both the EU and China to manage their relationship. 

For the EU, cooperation allows it to proactively assert a positive geopolitical identity by demonstrating that constructive engagement with China, 'a partner for cooperation', is possible even though the latter also constitutes 'an economic competitor and a systemic rival'.

For China, participating in a trilateral framework helps to mitigate potential reputational risks associated with its expanding influence in Africa. Cooperation can legitimise China’s role as a provider of ‘global public goods’, a role it is increasingly seeking to fill.

Furthermore, climate change and sustainable development are global challenges that demand unified international action. Both the EU and China, as two of the world’s largest emitters, share a responsibility under the Paris Agreement to facilitate global climate action. By pooling their resources towards green energy projects in Africa, they fulfil this collective commitment to climate change mitigation. This collaboration directly contributes to the delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly those related to universal energy access and climate adaptation.

However, EU-China cooperation becomes viable only when Africa itself shapes the terms and maintains an equilibrium. The African Union (AU) must frame green connectivity as an African-led, multi-partner domain, and both the EU and China must engage through the same channel to access green projects. In addition, a continent-wide procurement framework, preferably through the AU, African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), can require joint participation as a condition for access. It is no secret that both the EU and China seek legitimacy as partners of Africa; therefore, if African governments publicly prioritise trilateral collaboration formats, citing transparency, cost reduction, and alignment with Agenda 2063, neither power can justify circumventing African preferences without reputational costs.

Precedents for EU-China-Africa Trilateral Cooperation

Some early initiatives already demonstrate that EU-China collaboration in Africa, while limited, is not unprecedented. The first attempt was the EU-China-Africa Trilateral dialogue launched in 2008, which, although unsuccessful, created the institutional template for later engagements. 

More recently, the EU, China, and African partners have cooperated in sector-specific formats. For instance, in 2012, the EU established a trilateral dialogue on conventional arms control with Africa and China. It later expanded into the 2019 trilateral dialogue on preventing the diversion of arms and ammunition in Africa, a practical process implemented by Saferworld and African/Chinese partners that had delivered joint activities in Burkina Faso, South Sudan, and South Africa.

In the field of development finance, coordination has emerged through global platforms such as the Finance in Common Summit (2020), where the European Investment Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, African Development Bank, and Chinese development banks jointly discussed green recovery mechanisms.

Precedent for Climate and green energy cooperation is also identifiable within initiatives like the Sino-German Center for Sustainable Development (est. 2017), and earlier EU-China climate dialogues (e.g, the EU-China Climate Partnership renewed in 2018) have produced joint projects in renewable energy and capacity building, offering models that could be extended to Africa.

Collectively, these examples demonstrate that although political mistrust persists, functional and highly targeted trilateral engagement already exists and can be adapted for Africa’s green connectivity sectors.

Operationalising EU-China-Africa Cooperation on Green Connectivity

To build EU-China-Africa trilateralism, the Dar es Salaam Consensus offers a useful foundation for establishing key principles. Although the Dar es Salaam Consensus does not use the term ‘African-led’, its focus on sovereignty, mutual benefit, equality and self-determined development paths aligns with African states’ aspirations for balanced partnerships and economic autonomy, which clearly point towards African leadership as a foundational requirement for collaborative connectivity projects. As such, any trilateral cooperation between the EU and China in Africa must be structured around African-defined priorities. Embedding these principles into connectivity governance would help ensure that infrastructure cooperation supports long-term socio-economic transformation rather than dependency for African countries.

Within this context, there are two pragmatic arenas for cooperation between the EU and China. The first is co-financing mechanisms that combine Global Gateway funding with investment from Chinese and multilateral development banks. Co-financing enables large infrastructure projects to develop quickly while still maintaining compliance with environmental and procurement safeguards. A joint financing pool could deliver faster disbursement (one of China’s advantages) while ensuring high standards (an EU priority). 

The second arena for cooperation lies in capacity-building platforms focusing on knowledge transfer, skill development, and technological exchange. Drawing on European market design expertise and Chinese experience with rapid grid expansion, both actors can work together to empower African utilities, regulatory agencies, and grid operators. This is not an alien concept, as existing multilateral institutions such as the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the G20 Energy Transition Working Group offer reliable blueprints. Moreover, these institutions already provide neutral technical environments where both actors have previously cooperated, making them suitable templates for structured collaboration.

These arenas of collaboration provide a suitable leverage for both actors’ complementary strengths, align with African development priorities, and support the global energy transition without engaging issues of security and differences in political alignment. They demonstrate that while broad geopolitical convergence is unlikely, functional project-based cooperation in green energy and grids remains realistic. 

To operationalise the two cooperation arenas of co-financing mechanisms and capacity building platforms, two governance mechanisms are required for connectivity to function as a constructive tool for diplomacy rather than a field of zero-sum competition. 

The first step would be to establish structured trilateral dialogue platforms specifically focused on connectivity. They should include transparency rules, shared project databases, and clean procurement information. Think tanks such as the European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS) and African regional bodies such as  ECOWAS or the AU could host rotating dialogues, reducing mistrust and prompting early identification of overlapping interests. This would also normalise the idea that African governments can work with both actors without being cornered into exclusive alignments. This kind of platform could build on earlier EU-China-Africa initiatives, such as the 2008 Trilateral Dialogue and the 2019 Arms Diversion Dialogue, which provide templates for structured cooperation.

The second step would be to create joint standards and integration task forces for renewable energy and regional power grids. Independent project evaluation and debt-sustainability assessment processes would address one of the most practical barriers to cooperation. Establishing African-led, transparent monitoring bodies, supported by the EU and China, would strengthen accountability and prevent unsustainable financing practices while respecting national sovereignties. This approach directly aligns with the Dar es Salaam principle of win-win outcomes, leveraging complementary strengths to meet African development priorities. This mechanism could mirror the technical cooperation channels used in the previously mentioned EU-China Climate Partnership and the Sino-German Center for Sustainable Development.

Conclusion

Infrastructure has become one of the most contested arenas of EU-China relations, yet Africa’s green-energy transition demonstrates that connectivity does not necessarily imply geopolitical rivalry. As both actors scale up renewable investments, Africa is emerging not as a battleground but as a potential bridge, showing that cooperation is possible when it is anchored in transparency, shared standards, and African-defined priorities. 

Realising this potential will not reduce strategic tensions between Europe and China, but it can provide a diplomatic buffer. If guided by the principles of the Dar es Salaam Consensus - mutual benefit, equality, non-interference, and sustainable development - connectivity can evolve from a site of competition into a platform for responsible global engagement.

Ultimately, the question is not whether the EU and China will compete in Africa - because they already are - but whether they can also cooperate in ways that benefit Africa’s energy systems, accelerate decarbonisation, and support local industrial growth. Green connectivity is one area where such co-existence is not only possible but necessary.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author(s) alone and do not necessarily reflect those of European Guanxi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peggy Kere Osman is a master’s student in Development and Governance, with experience in community development and agricultural innovation across West Africa. Her work explores the intersection of climate resilience, sustainable livelihoods, and global cooperation, particularly within the context of Europe-China-Africa relations. As a MigRise Climate Fellow, she is passionate about how storytelling influences policy dialogue to amplify marginalised voices and promote inclusive governance.

This article was edited by Zheng Guan and Mateusz Tokarz.

Featured Image: Wind turbines for electric energy visible at Ngong Hills  / Free for use / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.